


I Believe; Help Thou My Unbelief

by ofinfinitesspace



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence (mentioned), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Nicky is so old!, Nicky might be older than the rosary!, Prayer, Religious Discussion, light despair?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:40:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26617603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ofinfinitesspace/pseuds/ofinfinitesspace
Summary: "It hadn’t occurred to her that Nicky would pray. Nile knew he’d been a priest and that he and Joe had met during the Crusades, but after Andy had laughed at her, she assumed they had all left their religious beliefs behind."In which, Nicky prays. Nile has an existential crisis. OfInfinitespace works out some stuff about prayer.(9/28: It turns out there was more, so I have revised tags/notes slightly.)
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nile Freedman & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova
Comments: 8
Kudos: 100





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A few disclaimers in reverse order of shockingness: 
> 
> 1\. I do not speak Italian and certainly don't speak whatever half-medieval half-modern Genoese dialect Nicky has cobbled together over the years. All hail Google Translate.
> 
> 2\. I am not AME and I'm certainly not a 900-year old ex-priest, I'm just a sort-of Quaker, sort-of Jewish history major doing her best. I did spend 30 minutes doing a side-by-side comparison of various versions of the Apostle's Creed, but let's be real, none of us know what we'd believe in this situation. The past is a foreign country - so is the future - this is an act of imagination. 
> 
> 3\. I have not seen this movie. I know! I KNOW. But I am drawn to this fandom like a moth to an incandescent light bulb. All complaints can be directed to sodiumflare who is currently enjoying the punchline to a 15 year old joke. 
> 
> Will there be more of this? Who knows? I was trying to write 100 words on Nile praying. I failed. But this seems like as good a place as any to work through an existential crisis about the place of god in a broken world and what we owe to each other. (Spoiler alert: turns out there was more.)

Three hours out of London, they stop to stretch and switch drivers. Andy is still asleep in the backseat, so Nile takes over from Joe. After a quiet word with Nicky in a language she doesn’t know, Joe climbs into the backseat with Andy and Nicky into the front seat. 

As she climbs into the driver’s seat and plugs her phone into the aux cable, Nicky turns to rummage for something in his back pack behind him. Joe unzips a pouch and palms something to him. He puts it in his hoodie pocket and Nile doesn’t think of it again until she’s sliding onto the highway. She checks the rearview mirror and catches a glimpse of Nicky out of the corner of her eye. Without knowing that he’s being watched, he quietly crosses himself, digs a hand into his hoodie pocket, tips his head back against head rest and closes his eyes with a sigh. 

Nile keeps her eyes on the road. It seems that Nicky wants privacy and she wants to give it to him. 

It hadn’t occurred to her that he would pray. She knew he’d been a priest and that he and Joe had met during the Crusades, but after Andy had laughed at her, she assumed they had all left their religious beliefs behind. She steals a glance sideways and Nicky still has his eyes closed and his head tipped back. His lips are moving soundlessly as his fingers flick slowly across a string of beads. She wonders how old that rosary is. The wooden beads look impossibly ancient and for a moment, so does Nicky.

Something like anger or maybe just sadness flashes through Nile. She’d been awed over the past few days by just how deeply not okay her new friends are but how tenderly they’d cared for each other anyway. Taking turns holding each other up - and holding her up too. And it makes her want to help. 

Joe has driven the first three hours, rage steaming off of him as he drove them away from London and Booker and the tumult of the week. Nicky has sat beside him and his hand had never left the back of Joe’s neck, where he rubbed slow circles with his thumb across the top vertebra, sometimes massaging the probably tight muscles at the base of his neck, sometimes straying to run his fingers through Joe’s hair. The farther they drove, the less anger seemed to boil in Joe. Maybe the driving helped him burn it off but from Niles vantage point in the backseat it looked like Nicky was pouring calm into him where his skin touched Joe’s.

And now Nicky prays the rosary alone. 

She knows now that the rosary was what Joe handed Nicky from the back seat. _He knows._ But it’s Andy who rests pulled against Joe’s chest in the back seat and not Nicky. Knowing their history, she doubts they share this. She wonders if there’s something she can offer him that the others can’t.

It occurs to her that the Pope that sent Nicky into battle couldn’t have imagined Martin Luther any more than Martin Luther could have imagined the AME church she grew up in. And yet, they have this in common: the reward for their faithfulness, everlasting life, had come early — and not at all in the way that they had been promised. She wonders how he makes sense of it and hopes one day she’ll get to ask. 

In the meantime, she doesn’t want to interrupt him and she doesn’t want to give offense. But she hasn’t prayed since she was on the plane with Andy unless you count spitting out “Jesus fucking Christ” as she hit the pavement with Merrick under her. She guesses she’d been waiting to be alone, but the only time she’d been alone in the last week she been dead. But now she thinks that maybe she doesn’t have to be. And maybe he doesn’t have to be either. 

As Nicky’s fingers slide over the last bead, Nile flicks through the music on her phone, carefully keeping her eyes on the road as she pushes play and turns the volume down to not wake Andy and Joe in the backseat. 

_Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home. Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home. I looked over Jordan and what did I see, coming for to carry me home. A band of angels coming after me, coming for to carry me home._

Across the console, Nicky reaches over and squeezes her hand.“What do you believe, Nile?,” Nicky asks cautiously. Like he’s touching something that might be hot and if he gets burned it won't heal in minutes.

Nile Freedman has had the Apostle’s Creed memorized since she was four years old. In 3rd grade, she won a prize in Sunday school for being able to recite the 25 Articles of Faith. She has always known what she believed and has always had the words to say it. Until right now, in this moment, when a 900 year-old ex-priest is looking at her with sad eyes asking her what she believes. She believed in a god of limitless possibility and yet, nothing that had happened to her in the last week, should had been possible. No amount of Sunday school drilling could have prepared her for this moment.

Silence hangs.

“It’s okay, Nile,” Nicky finally says. “I’ve been there.”

“What about you, Nicky, you’re…do you…” she trails off.

“Do I believe in the ‘the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting?” Nicky grins. It’s a profession of faith and an inside joke.

Nile stares at him without humor. He starts again, seriously. “Nile, you have to understand, I have evidence of things not seen and I have more doubts than I could have imagined possible. My body has been resurrected. I live a life everlasting. I have no idea if it’s salvation, damnation, or just the world’s most ironic coincidence.”

“But you pray.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It makes me feel less alone.”

Until an hour ago, he was the last person on earth she could have imagined feeling alone. 

“But…” she glances behind her, “you have Andy…and Joe.”

Nicky sighs. “Andy has other things. And Joe…" Nicky doesn't say, "Joe is so good." "Joe was never made to doubt he was beloved by God.”

Suddenly Nile knows. She remembers. “I believe that God loves you, Nicky. He loves all of us.” As soon as she says it she knows it’s true. It’s always been true. It was as true this week as it was last week. The only problem is, given this week in particular, she has absolutely no idea what it means.

Nicky exhales. “Will you pray with me, Nile?” She turns to look at him and swears she can see all 900 years of sorrow and exhaustion written on his face. She nods.

“Eyes on the road, Nile. We can’t die in a car crash but other…" The words die in the air when he remembers it isn’t true anymore. She snaps her focus back to the road, untangling their hands to bring her second hand back to the steering wheel. 

Softly, Nicky lays his hand at the top of her back, where her shoulders meet her spine, bows his head, and speaks- 

_The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want._

When Nile joins in, he switches to Italian. 

_Egli mi fa giacere in paschi erbosi, Mi guida lungo le acque chete.Egli mi ristora l’anima; Egli mi conduce per sentieri di giustizia, Per amor del suo Nome._

In the back seat, Joe stirs, roused by their voices. 

_Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me._

Something like peace settles over the car. Andy sleeps. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some footnotes:
> 
> Title: Mark 9:24 (KJV tweaked slightly to not sound awkward)
> 
> Apostle’s Creed, 10 – 12: "I believe in the Holy Spirit...the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.
> 
> Hebrews 11:1: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. The next line is “For by it the elders obtained a good report, “which, in this context. OOF.
> 
> Psalm 23: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want...I will fear no evil for thou art with me." Even I, unchurched heretic that I am apparently still have the 23rd Psalm memorized from like 3rd grade, so let's assume Nicky's making a safe bet assuming Nile knows it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He puts a hand on her back, rubbing soothingly in circles between her shoulder blades, “I want so badly to be able to tell you I know where we are going after all this.” He sounds like he means it. “But I don’t even know where we’re are going tomorrow.”  
> \--  
> In which, Nile has a nightmare. Nicky is having a 1,000 year long existential crisis. OfInfiniteSpace writes somethings she maybe wishes a 900-year-old ex-priest would say to her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimers from Chapter 1 remain: I still don't speak Italian (or latin!), I am still not a 900 year-old ex-priest. And I still have not seen this movie. Please direct all complaints to sodiumflare. 
> 
> I'm proofreading/uploading this while listening to Max Bruch's setting of Kol Nidre, so that's probably all you need to know about my headspace and the tone of this chapter.

“What do you dream about?” Nicky asks gently after a long silence.

Hours ago, Nile had woken up screaming. They were in their third safe-house in so many days. Andy and Copley were trying to find them a place to land where Copley could keep an eye on them but not _too_ close an eye. This was Nile’s third nightmare in the same number of nights. But not one of those nights had she woken up alone.

The first night it was Andy. It had seemed like maybe she was already up. When Nile screamed herself awake on the dingiest couch she’d ever seen, Andy was standing over her with a glass of water.

“Drink this,” she said, “or you’ll lose your voice,” and then she pet Nile’s head until she fell asleep again.

The second night it was Joe. She has barely noticed she was awake before she felt warm, strong arms around her. He must have been already awake too, because she knew he didn’t move that fast when he first woke up. But he held her through her tears without asking questions and murmured softly to her in another language until she was asleep again.

The third night it was Nicky. She wondered if they were taking turns, like she was a newborn learning to sleep through the night. There was still sleep in his eyes, but he’d knelt by the bottom bunk, run his hand across her back soothingly and whispered psalms into her ear, “ _He that dwells in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.”_

But she couldn’t fall back to sleep, so they sat on the porch of the safe house, looking out at the foothills of the Scottish highlands somewhere north of Glasgow. Nicky had made her a cup of tea and let her sit in silence, occasionally bumping her shoulder companionably to remind her he was there.

“It’s…nothing.”

“Nile, you’ve woken up screaming three nights in a row. It’s not _nothing.”_ He sounds scared. “We want to help you, but we can’t if you don’t tell us. Please don’t push us away.”

“No, I dream of _nothing._ When I die, there is nothing and then I am alive again. And when I dream of dying, there is nothing.” Her voice breaks and she takes a deep shaky breath. “Do you believe in heaven, Nicky?”

“Do I believe heaven exists or do I believe that I am going there?” He grins like he does when she asks him serious questions and he tries to duck them with a joke. Nile just stares into her mug, twirling the damp string of the tea bag around her finger. “There’s only darkness for me, too,” he says finally, “for all of us.”

“What does it mean?”

Nicky breaths slowly. “I have been wondering that 800 years.”

“Only 800.”

“Well, the first time I died I thought I’d been sent to hell. And then I spent 100 years being grateful that I hadn’t. And then I started wondering.”

“And now?”

“And now I don’t think about it much, to be honest,” he confesses. ”At some point I decided it was a problem for Nicky in the future, probably the far future, and given the stuff that present Nicky has to worry about, I figured it was better to just let the other guy deal with it. And I’m not so sure Heaven has a place for me in it anyway.” 

“Why not?” Nile asks in disbelief. Surely if anyone is a strong candidate, it’s this man, his gentleness and his generosity. Any of them, really. Though she imagines Andy would be offended if anyone suggested she go to heaven. Andy, it seemed, only went where she wanted to.

“Well, we’re born in sin, right? And I guess I just didn’t stop. I don’t know what’s going to heal this broken world, Nile, but as some point I decided I was going to go down swinging.”

“Is this about you and Joe...” She trails off, surely after almost 1,000 years Nicky no longer believed that being the person God made him could separate him from God’s love.

“Nile, I’m a sniper. I’ve spent hundreds of lifetimes perfecting the art of killing a person with one shot at the farthest distance possible given the technology available. That one is basic enough to be covered in the ten commandments.”

“But you fight for what you believe in? For good?”

“I think we do, but I also joined the Crusades because it was what I believed in at the time. I know that we’re only throwing darts at all the evil in the world. And even if we get it right, it comes at the cost of a lot of violence. We cause a lot of pain trying to do some good. I don’t know how St. Peter is going to do the math.”

“I was taught that we are saved by faith in Christ and by that faith alone. Good works cannot save us.”

Nicky shakes his head, laughing. “But they can’t don’t hurt, right?”

He looks at her seriously, “So much has changed in the world between my baptism and yours. That you could read the bible and interpret it for yourself, that you could pray directly to god, no intermediaries. That a man could be forgiven, not because he deserved it, but because he was loved. For the first 500 years of my life, it basically hadn’t occurred to anyone.”

It occurs to Nile now that maybe she isn’t the only one having an existential crisis. It seems like maybe Nicky has been having one since far before ‘existential’ was even a word. “What about Joe? He forgave you because he loved you, right?”

“Some old habits die very hard, Nile.” He turns to face her, crossing his legs underneath himself, turning his palms up and pushing them towards her. His hands don’t shake. They never shake. “I have killed a lot of people. Probably more people than you have ever met. It’s hard to imagine but it’s not an abstraction. I stand by my actions, but their lives were real. My hands are real, they’re mine, and they have blood on them.”

Something breaks in Nile, then, looking at Nicky’s grave expression and the calluses on his index fingers. The whirlwind of the week that was still spinning her dizzy and too many nights of little or bad sleep. Too many nightmares and too many prayers that felt like they came echoing back to her across empty space.

“I didn’t mean to kill so many people. I didn’t want to kill anyone. I just wanted to help. And now, when I pray, when I sleep, there’s no one on the other side. I’m all alone.” She tips forward, dropping her head into his open hands. He catches her, fingers that pull triggers rubbing soothing circles into her temples.

She shakes her head in his hands, tears starting to run down her cheeks. “I don’t know. I don’t know” she repeats. “I thought I knew, but I’m not sure anymore.

Nicky moves closer to her then, pulling her up and into his arms, cradling her head against his chest as she sobs. Softly, he sings an ancient hymn into her hair, “ _Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est_.”

“Nile, listen to me,” he brushes her cheek lightly once her trembling stops and her breathing settles, and she raises her head a bit. “Nile, listen to me. You are helpful. You are forgiven. You are _not_ alone.” He said it in a voice that Nile will come to teasingly call his priest-voice. It recalls a time when he could make things true by speaking them and for now, that would have to do.

She sighs, pulling out of his arms and sitting with her knees tucked up to her chest scrubbing at her eyes with her palms, trying to wring the last of her tears away.

He puts a hand on her back, rubbing soothingly in circles between her shoulder blades, “I want so badly to be able to tell you I know where we are going after all this.” He sounds like he means it. “But I don’t even know where we’re are going tomorrow.”

Nile laughs a little and unfurls, leaning back, supporting herself with her arms behind her, dropping her feet off the front of the porch to swing. “I guess I gotta go to Andy for the big questions,” she grinned.

“Oh no, don’t do that. Not unless the big questions are logistical.” He pauses, “We’re going to keep telling you that it gets easier, and we’re not lying, I promise. But it’s going to take a very long time.

“When did it get easier for you?” 

Nicky sighs, like he’s trying to decide if he should tell the truth.“After about 300 years I think. It took so long for Joe and I to stop killing each other and even longer for us to find our love for each other. And to find Andy and Quynh. There’s not much from my childhood that I would wish even on an enemy, but it was the only life I’d known. There was a lot to grieve. And then the plague came, and suddenly I could be useful. We couldn’t save anyone but we could be there when it mattered. When other people had to be afraid of being near the ones they loved, I could give last rites. And suddenly in the midst of all that darkness, I started to notice things that there were good things in the world, good things in this life.”

“My mom used to say she saw glimpses of heaven all around us.”

She looks like she might cry again and Nicky smiles at her full of warmth. “I bet she did, she saw you.”

Joe slips out the door behind them dressed for a run. He plants a kiss on the top of Nicky’s head, puts a hand on top of Nile’s like a benediction, and asks no questions before moving off toward the hills.

“I don’t know what heaven could give me, that I don’t already have,” Nicky says finally after a long silence. It sounds like something Joe would say when he’s being sweet and overly effusive, but coming out of Nicky’s mouth it doesn’t sound romantic. It sounds like it could be true.

“I have known great love.” He continues, “Not just Joe’s, but Andy’s. And Quynh’s.” There is a pause where Booker’s name might be if he could bring himself to say it out loud. “And now yours. I have a family. I have work that suits me, that gives me purpose. All the things I was looking for in the church. But god didn’t give me those things there. He gave them to me here. He reaches out to wrap his arms around her again, pulling her back against his chest and turning them out to look at the landscape, toward mountains, sheep, Joe running in the distance, and the slowly rising sun. “The kingdom of heaven is at hand, yeah?” he says as he rests his chin on the top of her head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some footnotes: 
> 
> "Being the person God made him...God's love." We're just not going to talk about how I stole this wholesale from the acknowledgements to John Green and David Levithan's Will Grayson Will Grayson. Sometimes you read a single line in 2013 and you never stop thinking about. 
> 
> "Ubi caritas et amour, deus ibi est." Where charity and love are, there God is. From a hymn attributed to Paulinus Aquiliea in796. I imagine that Nicky sings the Taize setting, for no other reason than I like it better. 
> 
> "The kingdom of heaven is at hand." Matthew 3:2 and like eight other places.


End file.
